Desert Rose
by ladytahiri
Summary: As far as I was concerned, I had been born in blood and fire on the day a pretty boy bought me a hamburger, and everything that came before was as a portrait in sepia – rendered in shades of charcoal or gray.
1. Chapter 1

**Disclaimer**: Not the S. Meyer you're looking for.

**A/N**: Spoilers for _The Short Second Life of Bree Tanner_. AU. One way or another, Bree and Diego make it out alive at the end of _Eclipse_, hook up with Fred and embark on the shiny new life of a newborn vampire. Or not. This little ficlet will be in two or three parts.

* * *

_I dream of fire  
Those dreams are tied to a horse that will never tire  
And in the flames  
Her shadows play in the shape of a man's desire  
_~Sting, "Desert Rose"

* * *

We had been in Vancouver three months when Diego began to talk of going to the beach. He would run his fingers idly through my hair while describing sunsets and sailboats, stars as bright as jewels, far from the glare of city lights. He talked about sipping mango juice from coconut shells. I reminded him that it was fresh blood and not fresh mango we craved now.

When it was Fred's night to hunt, Diego and I crept onto the roof of the abandoned warehouse we called home and laid out our picnic blanket and whiled away the hours until sunrise with stories. Once in a blue moon, if I was lucky, I was able to beg or bully him into singing to me.

"I sang tenor," he told me. "In the a capella."

I raised an eyebrow. "Sounds fancy. We didn't have those where I came from."

"It means 'without accompaniment.' Just a bunch of guys singing - no piano, no orchestra."

"No girls?"

His teeth flashed, sharp and white in a tanned face. "They had their own group. To be honest, I wasn't sold on the idea at first. I have a decent voice, but the real reason I joined was so I could put down another extracurricular, for applying to …"

He trailed off. Since leaving Riley, our past lives were no longer a taboo subject. We spoke often in general terms about the kinds of TV shows we watched, the music we listened to. We assiduously avoided discussing the details of our families, our pets, our day-to-day existences. As far as I was concerned, I had been born in blood and fire on the day a pretty boy bought me a hamburger, and everything that came before was like a portrait in sepia – rendered in shades of charcoal or gray. My world came in only one color now, and that was red.

I gestured at the checkered cloth of the picnic blanket. "This is ridiculous."

"Our coming up here for a picnic?"

"Our pretending this is a picnic. The only kind of picnics we're invited to is the kind where we rip people's throats out, and it's no use pretending any different."

Diego's brow was furrowed, deep in thought. He didn't contradict me. Instead, he said, "Let's go to the beach, Bree."

My mouth fell open. "What, in broad daylight?"

"How are you going to sunbathe at night?"

"You're insane," I said.

"Bree, _querida_ – "

"You have to stop doing this. You can't go back to that – can't go back to before."

"What are you talking about? I just want to go to the beach. You could pick out a bikini –"

"_Listen_ to yourself, Diego! You no perfectly well what would happen if we went to the beach. Police. National Guard. Media circus. Little kids wanting to poke us with popsicle sticks. Not necessarily in that order."

"Jesus, Bree, calm down. I didn't mean a public beach." He reached for my hand and I pulled away.

I looked at him somberly. I said, "You never call me _querida_ unless you want something from me."

* * *

The warehouse straddled the border between the industrial district and the shantytown, where migrant workers ghosted in and out. Maybe they were searching for gainful employment, and maybe they were searching for the next meal to sate their immediate hunger, as we were. The young people I saw on the streets pulled their hoods up like cowls. The three of us in our ragged clothing blended right in with the unsavory element of our chosen neighborhood.

We had chosen the warehouse because it was empty, and abandoned, and no one was likely to lay claim to it, considering the shape it was in. But as Diego pointed out, a big hole in the wall didn't present a problem for vampires. Vampires didn't get cold.

In fact, it was Diego who chose the warehouse. Fred and I just went along with him. It took me a long time to realize that he was consciously trying to distance us from Riley, from the way Riley did things. When Riley picked a new headquarters, we always had to evict the previous tenants first. Some of the others (I flinched as the image of Raoul flashed before my eyes) enjoyed that part more than they should have.

We could have gotten nicer clothes. That we chose to wear cast-offs from our old life and raid thrift stores rather than malls was just that, another choice, another incongruity to file away under the giant question mark of who we were, _what_ we were. Sometimes – not often – I forgot that I wore a predator's body; that I was a hunter, not a weak, slow human grubbing in the soil. Other times the excruciating burn of bloodlust in the back of my throat wiped every other thought from my mind for hours, days. Those times, it helped to be near Diego. He made me feel more – not human, because we were not that, never that – but more myself. He made me feel like I'd come home.


	2. Chapter 2

_I dream of rain__  
I dream of gardens in the desert sand  
I wake in vain  
I dream of love as time runs through my hand  
_

He was born in Arizona, and for him leaving the desert was like being made to walk barefoot out of paradise.

"Didn't you want to see what the ocean looked like?" I asked.

"I wanted to stay with my grandmother," he said.

"Why didn't you?"

"I couldn't let Felix go alone."

Felix had been eight years old when they first came to California, and his chocolate-brown eyes had widened in wonder at the sight of cities that stretched from the hilltops all the way down to where the ocean met the sky.

"The Chinese," said Diego, "still call it 'Old Gold Mountain,' _Jiujin_ _Shan_, even after all these years."

I was mystified, and it must have shown on my face.

Diego began to croon a familiar melody.

_In a cavern, in a canyon,_  
_Excavating for a mine,_  
_Dwelt a miner, forty-niner_  
_And his daughter Clementine._

_Oh my darling, oh my darling_  
_Oh my darling, Clementine_  
_Thou art lost and gone forever,_  
_Dreadful sorry, Clementine._

He stopped. It suddenly struck me that this was a _sad_ song; that maybe every song was a sad song, a ballad for what was lost, and only children in their innocence failed to recognize this.

He explained that the term "forty-niner" originated in the Gold Rush of 1848. Then, when they found gold in British Columbia a decade later, San Francisco became known as "Old Gold Mountain" to distinguish it from all the other places where the rivers were said to run like veins of gold through a parched yellow land.

"British Columbia," I repeated, and I knew the words were supposed to mean something to me.

Diego's steady gaze never left mine. "That's where we are now. Vancouver, British Columbia."

"I knew that," I said.

I hadn't really, but he didn't call me on the lie.

There was no reason I should have known the name of the province we were living in – we who seldom left the warehouse in daylight; we who had no use for sidewalks where there were rooftops. In fact, we had little use for human society in general, and yet we clung to the last vestiges of our humanity like survivors of a shipwreck clinging to driftwood. Did we not realize that we had grown gills in place of lungs? That we could not have drowned now if we tried?

I made a point of learning all ten of Canada's provinces by heart – even the strange-sounding Indian ones that twisted my tongue.

Because this was the difference between Diego and me: He was a smart kid who had almost made it out of the barrio, and I was white trash. He had had his whole life ahead of him, and I? I had had a lifetime of beatings to look forward to. Becoming a vampire was probably the best thing that ever happened to me. Diego had _mattered_ to people – to Felix, to his parents, to his grandmother. Me, I had mattered to nobody, and no amount of blood could wash that truth away.

* * *

Fred was partial to Hitchcock movies and classic science fiction, and on my infrequent trips to the library I did my best to pick items he would enjoy. I looked for frayed book covers featuring spaceships or aliens, and a publication date prior to 1950, and then I moved on to the audiovisual section. We didn't have a DVD player – we didn't even have TV – but we did have a laptop that we'd stolen from Best Buy.

I liked to borrow books from the library because it was just that, borrowing, not stealing by another name. When Fred took too long to finish reading I chided him about incurring overdue fines.

We were a heartbeat away from normality, our little coven.

It was Diego who insisted on calling ourselves a coven rather than, say, a gang, or a poker club, or a couple of teenagers who woke up one day to find that somebody had ripped a hole in the sky. All of which were equally valid descriptions (Fred regularly owned the two of us at poker).

It was becoming clear that Diego was assuming more and more the responsibilities of a leader, insofar as three kids who couldn't decide where to have dinner from one day to the next were amenable to leadership.

As I neared the year mark, I began to be able to think of hunting as no more extraordinary an activity than making a dinner reservation. Reality is always messier than the words we shape around it. The fact is, we knew there were other vampires in Vancouver, and we had no desire to run into them, by chance or by design. So we varied our feeding grounds and our hunting times, and disposed of the evidence as quickly and efficiently as possible. Our days of heaving leaden bodies into Puget Sound were over.

Once, I dreamt of a human pyramid piled high with the corpses of our victims, the oldest of which had turned into skeletons – here the curve of a skull, there a rib. When I woke up I crawled, whimpering, to Diego's pallet on the other side of the room. He told me later that the human body didn't decay that quickly, that it would be years if not decades before they got to that point. _Ashes to ashes, dust to dust_.I would have liked to claim that I was repulsed by the act of draining a human being of his life's blood. But mostly I was just hungry. Within two days of feeding I would begin to throb with the familiar ache, and then it became impossible to think about humans, or warm blood, or skin stretched tight over tendon and bone, without wanting to sink my teeth into something. Diego assured me that this, too – the insatiable hunger of the newborn – would pass.

Diego read history. He read about Tudor England and Mughal India and Alexander the Great and Timur the Lame; he read about Russians in Afghanistan and Belgians in the Congo; mostly, though, he read about Italy. I must have spent hours browsing the oversized books section on his behalf. He was particularly interested in reproductions of paintings and frescoes from the Renaissance period onwards. He would turn to a page with an illustration of angels and leave the book lying open on the floor, so that over the weeks a bizarre pattern of tiles spread across the floor of the warehouse. Fred and I stepped gingerly around the books. It seemed to me they were artifacts of a lost civilization, and Diego the archaeologist bent on recovering their secrets.

One morning I woke perched on a rafter, staring down at the mosaic of books below me as if from a dizzying height. I thought, _I've gone and woken up in the Sistine Chapel_.

* * *

The aisles were barely recognizable when not awash in fluorescent light. Inside the store, it was like striding down the streets in the twilit hours between dusk and dark – a comfortable feeling, a familiar feeling. Diego steered me by the elbow towards the women's swimwear section.

I took one look at the vastly depleted selection and turned around, only to slam into the solid wall of Diego's chest.

"Bree," he said.

"I don't – " I shook my head. "What are we _doing _here?"

My palms were still resting flat against his chest. He took my hand, curled his fingers around my fist. "We're going to the beach tomorrow."

"I don't want to go to the beach."

He smoothed back a lock of my hair and tucked it behind my ear. "The first time I saw you standing in the sun, back in that cave, I was convinced you were the most beautiful thing I'd ever laid eyes on. And I still am."

And standing there in the circle of his arms, I wanted to believe that it was true, that he needed me as much as I needed him. I said, "You're different, Diego. You were on track to _something_, somewhere better than the rest of us were headed, and when it happened to you" - I made a motion to indicate the two of us, the indestructible bodies we now inhabited - "well, you took it better than most of us. You had a family who – anyway, you had a family, which is more than I had. And sooner or later you're going to go back to your books, and I'm – I – I'm not –"

He cut me off. "It doesn't matter." He brought a hand up to cup my cheek. "Everything I have is right here."

"Oh," was all I could think to say before he kissed me.

* * *

We decided to try the department stores at the mall. It couldn't be that much harder to break into than Wal-Mart. On the way, he explained about the books.

"Do you remember that time we followed Riley to _her_?"

I nodded. It would be difficult to forget the second most harrowing night of my existence as a vampire – second only to the massacre that we had escaped by the skin of our unnaturally sharp teeth; the massacre that Riley would have deliberately led us into.

"Those people who came – the ones who were dressed alike – she was expecting them. There are rules in the vampire world that we don't know about. Those people are the powerbrokers, I'm sure of it. To understand the rules, first we have to understand _them_."

"They live in Italy," I said slowly, as it dawned on me what he had been doing these past few weeks.

"Yes. And if half the legends are true, they've been around for a long, long time."

"What are we going to do about them?"

Diego gave my hand a reassuring squeeze. "What we've been doing since we left Seattle. Keep our heads down. Don't draw attention. Make clean kills." He broke into a grin then, the first genuine smile I had seen from him in ages. "Take you to the beach."

I told him I had a few conditions. For starters, Canada was too cold, too flat, too empty. I wanted to head south. I wanted to see the desert.

"Bree, the desert is nothing if not empty."

"Still," I said. "It's part of you. It's who you are. And as long as I'm with you, it'll be okay."

"Yeah. It will."

_fin_

**A/N**: I really appreciate the feedback! It means a lot to me that you guys took the time to review/favorite. This fic turned out a lot mushier than I intended. I was going for an ANGST CIRCUS, let me tell you. I found Bree's passivity problematic in the novella and I continue to find it problematic here, because letting Diego take the lead is well and good but it's rare that we ever see her DO anything. But I guess that's a problem that can wait to be rectified in another story.


End file.
